


Lived through their vocations

by Harpokrates



Category: Star Wars: Rebels
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Gen, Post-Episode: s03e21-22 Zero Hour
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-12
Updated: 2020-01-12
Packaged: 2021-02-27 04:01:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,769
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22230745
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Harpokrates/pseuds/Harpokrates
Summary: After the battle, Zeb speaks to their new double agent.
Relationships: Alexsandr Kallus & Garazeb "Zeb" Orrelios
Comments: 6
Kudos: 61





	Lived through their vocations

"You look like shit." Zeb said.

Agent Kallus looked up at him. Even that seemed to exhaust him though, so he dropped his head back down to the medical cot.

"I feel like it." He murmured. Karabast did he sound awful. Zeb pushed himself off the doorway and sideled into the medbay proper. This place stank like antiseptic and blood. Zeb stifled a sneeze and groaned.

Kallus huffed a laugh, then hissed, pressing his fingertips to his chest.

"They really put you through the ringer," Zeb said, dragging over and chair and straddling it. "What'd Thrawn do to you?"

"Oh, this and that." Kallus whispered, looking at him through the one eye that wasn't swollen shut. "My chart…"

He trailed off, out of breath, but Zeb got the picture. He tapped the display at the end of the cot and brought up the mediholo—a little homunculus of Kallus with his injuries picked out in red.

Zeb let out a low whistle. "Thorough guy."

He didn't need the mediholo to see that Kallus'd had the shit kicked out of him. A set of shiners, split lip. His face looked funny back on the shuttle, which Zeb had attributed to swelling at the time but was actually a shattered cheekbone. He'd pissed himself at some point during Imperial interrogation, which was normal, but what wasn't normal was that it was basically all blood running down the inside of his trouser leg—the medical bots said he was down a kidney now, apparently humans had more than one. His weird looking shoulders were from being racked, he couldn't put weight on his bad leg. It was a miracle he had even been standing, let alone able to co-ordinate his own escape.

Kallus huffed another laugh, then grimaced.

"Stop doing that." Zeb said.

Kallus looked at him. It was probably supposed to be a glare, but nothing on his face was moving for the swelling.

"Gave you a buzz cut." Zeb gestured to the patch of shaved hair on Karrus' head. "What, Ezra that fashionable?"

"Bacta injections through the bone." Kallus waved his hand vaguely. "Concussion."

Zeb winced. "Nasty stuff. Hey," he leaned forwards. Kallus tracked him with his eyes. "You gotta know how your escape looks."

Kallus' lips thinned. "Suspicious."

If you had seen him on the shuttle and had a measure on the guy, it wasn't. Kallus was a weeping mess. No one had a handle on themselves after the Empire dragged them down to the lower levels, but the Agent was broken beyond that. 

Kallus… Kallus was the kind of man who's dignity couldn't parse with weakness. The idea that he had been tortured, cried, then escaped under the full observation of Thrawn was laughable.

But you had to know him to know that, and Mon Mothma and her ilk hadn't spent years on a smuggling and harassment campaign.

Zeb shrugged. "Maybe. How'd you do it?"

Kallus gestured weakly. "I passed out. Something exploded and killed the two Stormtroopers guarding me. I was on the ground. Didn't hit me."

"Lucky."

"Thought," Kallus paused to breath, "you didn't believe in luck."

"What? May the Force be with you?" Zeb waggled his fingers.

Kallus exhaled. It was as much of a laugh as he could manage. "Sure."

"So," Zeb leaned forwards a bit, "Fulcrum, huh?"

"Yeah."

"Pft. Can't believe it. Still can't believe it. You, of all people to turn traitor."

Kallus winced. "Don't call it that."

"Why not? It's what you are." Zeb pointed out. "ISB Agent Turncoat Kallus."

"My name is Alexsandr."

"Alright. Point remains."

"I saw the cracks," he waved his fingers, "I got selfish. The Empire left me on that moon; I was angry."

"The Rebellion thanks you for your temper, then." Zeb grossed his arms. "Hard to believe this is the first time your boss has pissed you off."

Kallus' arms shifted like he was trying to shrug. "I stopped deluding myself. The Empire is… ," he cut himself off. "I was a captain in the Republic Navy, before they introduced the Grand Army. Sometimes, I think the Republic was just as bad as the Empire is, and so are the people who want it back."

He exhaled. "Saw Guerra is a monster, but so is Thrawn."

"Guerra is doing the right thing."

"Thrawn thinks so too."

Zeb sighed, dragging a hand over his face. He was running on less than three hours of sleep over two days, and it was beginning to wear.

"Empire's not right." He muttered.

"You really think the galaxy can function without an overarching government? Trade deals would collapse, galactic security would crumble. It'd be a galaxy of pirates and system warlords and monopolies."

"Maybe," Zeb admitted grudgingly, "but not the Empire."

"No, not them."

They sat in silence for a while, until Kallus' cringing got too irritating to stand.

"You need more painkillers or something?" Zeb snapped at him. 

"Probably."

"I'll activate the droid."

"I don't want them." Kallus said.

Zed looked at him, an eyebrow raised.

"You can understand if I don't want to be drugged out of my mind when your leaders come in to speak with me. I'll inevitably tell them everything right away, and I'd like to keep some secrets up my sleeves—if only to prolong the inevitable."

"The inevitable?"

"My execution." Kallus croaked it out so matter of factly that it took a moment for Zeb to stop laughing and realize he was being serious.

"Your what?" Zeb wiped at his eye. "You can't be serious."

"Why can't I be? I'm a criminal under Alliance law, and moreover, I'm dangerous. I know you, I know your team, and I know how the Fulcrum network operates. Who's to say I won't get sick of you and start funneling everything back to Imperial High Command?" Kallus groaned a bit, shifting into a slightly less uncomfortable position, "At least I know your lot won't make it painful. The Grand Admiral has something of a personal vendetta, I think."

"I'd slap you if I didn't think it'd give you a heart attack. You've got to stop thinking like an Imp, mate."

"This is why the rebels are losing." Kallus leaned up, putting as much weight as he could manage on his elbow. "Do you have any idea how easy it was to get into Fulcrum? If I wanted to destroy the Alliance, I could do it in an afternoon."

"Then why haven't you?"

Kallus' arm gave out. "I don't have a spare afternoon. You're lucky Thrawn likes playing games. If Moff Tarkin was involved this entire planet would have been carpet bombed." He exhaled. "And you're lucky in general."

"We've got the Force on our side," Zeb waggled his fingers. "The galaxy itself wants us to win. You wanna know why you didn't do it?"

Kallus narrowed his eyes. "Do tell."

"You're a good man, former Agent." Zeb said, meeting his gaze and holding it steady. "In here."

Zeb reached out and brushed the backs of his knuckles against Kallus' bandaged chest. "We call it 'teerhon' in Lasat. There's the part of you that lives in your head, the part of you that remembers to eat and how to fight, and there's the ephemeral part of you, the part deep down, that you don't talk about. It tells you right from wrong. The Imperials—Thrawn, Tarkin, Vader, they have 'ouenr teerhon'—they're all mixed up inside; the good and the bad blended together until they can do anything and forgive themselves for it. But you're not like them."

"I'm exactly like them," Kallus hissed, "only they command an army. I can only commit atrocity on a small scale."

"So you say. I'd say your injuries disagree."

"I oversaw the genocide of your people!" Kallus sounded desperate. "Is this some kind of joke to you?"

Zeb pressed his shoulder down until he was vertical again. "I think you should take those painkillers, mate. You're out of your head."

Kallus sighed, and let Zeb lie him down and make sure he wasn't going to die because one of his tubes got kinked. 

"I am a bad man, Lasat. It would be justice to let them kill me."

"That makes two of us." Zeb considered him. "See, that's what separates you Imps from us—you think we get justice when you die, but I think we get justice when you make up for all the shit you've pulled. So why don't we make a deal?"

"A deal?" Kallus' was half asleep, but fighting the exhaustion.

"Yeah. I, the last Lasat on Lasan," Zeb did his best to avoid outright lying, but verbal trickery didn't count, "speak on behalf of my species—you're forgiven  _ if _ ," Zeb held up a finger, "you help us destroy the Empire. If you go and get yourself killed by Mon Mothma, no forgiveness—it's straight to Lasat hell for you."

"What's Lasat hell like?"

Lasat didn't have a hell like the Corrillians; one was just denied reincarnation and doomed to wander the reaches of the Wild Space as a mindless spectre for eternity, but metaphysical crap like that was beyond Kallus' comprehension at this point.

"Real bad. It's like getting devoured by a sarlacc but worse, because your graduating class is there to make fun of you the entire time."

"I think you're lying." Kallus whispered.

"Well, you'll never meet another Lasat. No choice but believe me. We have a deal?"

Kallus exhaled, and raised his hand. "Deal."

He let it drop onto Zeb's before the exhaustion took him entirely. Zeb smiled and gripped it, before laying it to rest along Kallus' side. Then he stood up and tucked the chair back where he'd found it, and exited the medical bay,

Perhaps if Kallus really was the butcher of the Lasat, Zeb would be more unkind to him, but he wasn't, even if he didn't know it. He was the only one among the lot of them that understood a warrior culture. Sabine was Mandalorian, sure, but she was part of the kinder faction. The Mandalorians Zeb knew were more akin to cultish berserkers. He could respect it, sure, but those weren't the kind of people he liked to acquaint with.

Maybe it was his personal fondness for Kallus that was affecting his judgement. One didn't survive nearly being eaten while avoiding freezing to death and come out of it an unchanged man.

Whatever. He was the hitting guy, not the deep introspective journeys guy. That was Jedi territory. He trusted Kallus, deep in his gut, the way his teerhon told him he should. Maybe that was enough.

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from New Order's Blue Monday.
> 
> I thought Kallus' turncoat moment was really good, and recently saw Rise of Skywalker (not very good); anyways, wanted to write this. 
> 
> George Lucas please tell me the politics of star wars. What is the difference between the rebellion and the separatists, and the republic and the empire? Is it the lack of senators? What was Leia doing then? She was a senator, right? Do we like the republic because it has main characters, and also like the alliance because it also has main characters? Is it just because the empire is fascists lead by a space wizard? Because the republic was a corrupt bureaucracy also lead by a space wizard. Also slavery was overlooked by both of them.
> 
> The more you learn about star wars the worse it gets actually.
> 
> Thanks for reading!


End file.
